Internship - Data Science

Are you excited by the opportunity to pioneer the future of travel? Do you want to redefine mobile travel experiences? Are you ready to fuel industry change and jumpstart your career in Data Science? Expedia Group paves the way for early career talent to go far, fast with accelerated career advancement, unparalleled access to leadership and a culture of exceptional acceptance.

Travel is so much more than simply reaching your destination. Along your journey you will make an immediate impact on reimagining the way people search for travel as part of an awesome team that will help invent brand new techniques to bring the world within reach. From using your strong coding skills to break new ground with machine learning, to applying these new techniques to services that run tens of thousands of requests per second, there is no shortage of opportunities for technical innovation at Expedia Group – the sky’s the limit!  

What You’ll do: 

• You will use apply statistics concepts like confidence intervals, point estimates and sample size to make sound and confident inferences on data and A/B tests. 
• You will use and manipulate large data sets to design algorithmic and machine learning solutions as well as provide business insights. 
• Apply solid coding skills, strong analytical and innovative thinking, and Machine Learning expertise to quickly learn new domains and turn innovative ideas into working solutions (from the London Document) 
• You will also communicate complex analytical topics in a clean & simple way to multiple partners and senior leadership (both internal & external).

Within Data Science, we have three different tracks roles with multiple openings in each of the following areas.   

• Machine Learning Scientist Intern: Role typically includes building feature pipelines, prototyping new machine learning models and evaluating performance of the algorithms both offline and via A/B tests. 
• Machine Learning Engineer Intern: Ideal candidate enjoys building ML systems and cares about software engineering principles like CD/CI and code stability, while productionizing machine learning models. 
• Statistician Intern: Candidates typically have an Operations Research or Statistics background and care about defining measurements for algorithm performance in the wild and help define and implement core e-commerce concepts like customer life-time value, marketing attribution etc. 

Who You are: 

• You are currently pursuing a master’s or PhD degree in quantitative fields such as: Computer Science (with focus in areas like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Data Science), Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, Electrical & Computer Engineering 

• Graduating in 2021 or 2022
• You have proven theoretical understanding various machine learning topics like Regression, Naïve Bayes, Decision Trees, Random Forests, SVMs, Neural Networks. 
• We would like to see experience with statistical computing environments such as R, scikit-learn, SparkML, Python (pandas) etc. 
• You should have strong knowledge and experience in one or more database technologies, including SQL and other relational databases, no-SQL, and Time Series databases 
• You have an understanding of distributed file systems, scalable datastores, distributed computing and related technologies (Spark, Hadoop, etc.); implementation experience of MapReduce techniques, in-memory data processing, etc. 
• You have familiarity with cloud computing, AWS specifically, in a distributed computing context. 

Computer Languages:   

• Must-have: Scala and/or Python, SQL 
• Nice-to-have: Java, R, C++ 

Data Science Technologies:  

• A few of these: Spark/PySpark, MLlib, TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, Caffe, Python ML libs (Pandas, Matplotlib, Scipy, Sklearn, Numpy etc) 
• Nice-to-have: Hive, Hadoop, Microsoft SQL Server 

Some exciting projects our interns have worked on: 

• Understanding traveler booking preference is the key to provide efficient matches between travelers and partners. This project leveraged both NLP and ML techniques to extract valuable information from traveler reviews. By transforming the unstructured data into structured understanding of traveler preferences, it will enable us to enhance listing valuation models, help us identify real competitions among listings and make effective supply acquisition decisions.  
• Our pricing data science team solves a multi-objective optimization function in the two-sided marketplace to algorithmically identify the best prices to drive more transactions, creating a multi-item trip price incentive for the users and increased transactions for the suppliers. This is done by creating prediction models for various key performance indices. These predictions come with errors and can result in suboptimal solutions for the optimization. In this project, we aim to first investigate the Neural network dropout based uncertainty estimation technique and then use it create a robust optimization framework that can solve the  multi-objective optimization function more accurately, leading to improved pricing for both the users and the suppliers. 

Testimonials 

"My internship on the Data Science team was an incredible experience of being able to dive deeply into embedding algorithms and deep learning architecture, two fascinating areas of data science. I was also able to work collaboratively with a team of brilliant and supportive data science and machine learning professionals.” 
"Contributing to a project that was challenging and, at the same time, having a direct impact on improving the company’s revenue kept me motivated. Being surrounded by amazing minds in the team, along with a collaborative learning environment, helped me grow as an emerging data scientist."  

Your internship will include: 

• Dedicated support from your manager and mentor for the summer 
• Social, community and learning events 
• Relocation assistance, if eligible 
• Hotel discounts 

You’ve Applied, Now What? 

We will review your application and if you are considered a fit, we will invite you to take an online assessment. Those who pass the assessment will be invited for a final interview. 
Intern Program Date: To ensure a consistent experience, we offer one internship start date. 

• June 21st through to August 27th 2021– London

Why Join Us? 

Expedia Group recognizes our success is dependent on the success of our people.  We are a global travel platform, made up of the most knowledgeable, passionate, and creative people in our business.  Our brands recognize the power of travel to break down barriers and bring the world within reach – that responsibility inspires us to be the place where exceptional people want to do their best work, and to provide them the tools to do so.    
Whether you're applying to work in engineering or customer support, marketing or lodging supply, at Expedia Group we act as one team, working towards a common goal; to bring the world within reach.  We relentlessly strive for better, but not at the cost of the customer.  We act with humility and optimism, respecting ideas big and small.  We value diversity and voices of all volumes. We are a global organization but keep our feet on the ground so we can act fast and stay simple.  Our teams also have the chance to give back on a local level and make a difference through our corporate social responsibility program, Expedia Cares. 
If you have a hunger to make a difference with one of the most loved brands in the world and to work in the dynamic travel industry, this is the job for you.